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Engaging Children With the Siren Call of the App

Each summer for several years, a two-week seminar at the American Museum of Natural History has allowed 25 youngsters to use technology to resurrect a prehistoric marine animal by designing realistic 3-D models and sea environments.

Every year, the program, “Virtual World Institute: Cretaceous Seas,” for children ages 11 to 14, fills up quickly.

One attendee in last summer’s program, Tammuz Frankel, a 12-year-old student at Hunter College High School, said, “From a very young age, I have been interested in paleontology, but I don’t know much about prehistoric seas. I wanted to learn more about this little-known part of the Mesozoic Era.”

The program has been so successful that the museum has since added two more August seminars on different topics.

The natural history museum is not alone in seeking innovative ways to engage children and families in the museum-going experience. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and others have also been active.

Because digital platforms are relevant and accessible, they are familiar to “digital natives,” young people who have grown up with technology, said Rebecca Edwards, education specialist for family audiences at the Getty. One advantage of digital games is that many visitors already have smartphones. And the games let museums offer a broader menu for youngsters without requiring more staff members, like tour leaders, or printed materials, although creating the games is not an inexpensive challenge.

Not all museums are enamored with technology, however. Some are hesitant to encourage families to bring on the iPhones. For example, next summer the Philadelphia Museum of Art is planning five simultaneous exhibits oriented to families, including an interactive watercolor project inspired by the award-winning artist and author Jerry Pinkney as well as an environment using fancy dress costumes from the early 20th century for children in a setting designed by the artist Candy Depew. “There is a small amount of technology, but that is not the focus of what we do with kids,” said Emily Schreiner, associate curator of education for family and community learning at the museum.

“Technology is kind of a contentious issue,” she said. “Adults are not always comfortable with their kids being on iPhones. What we want them to take away from the museum is an opportunity to slow down, look closely and spend time as a family.”

Already the museum has a monthly series of “Stroller Tours” for parents and caregivers that lets them spend time together looking at art. “We have found them to be extremely successful,” Ms. Schreiner said. “We find that our visitors come back, become members and feel welcomed into the museum.”

Nevertheless, technology is a component of many programs.

For example, the Getty has a new youth-oriented application for smartphones through a game it calls Switch, in which an evil genie has wreaked havoc at the museum. The paintings in an app are not the exact duplicates of the paintings on the wall, so players must find the differences. The challenge is to correct details in a copy of the museum painting on the iPhone so that it matches the actual image.

In the first test, there were a series of details including the absence of a brooch in an oil painting of Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The player has to figure out and correct what is inaccurate.

The game consists of four paintings, a deliberately small number to keep the game from feeling repetitive and to encourage youngsters to go on to other things at the museum.

Photo

PLAYING ALONG Switch, a game in which an evil genie has wreaked havoc at the Getty, being demonstrated at the museum.Credit
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

The Getty has also created an audio tour in which animals in various works of art talk about themselves.

Since admission to the museum is free, the games are not intended to increase revenue, although more visitors are certainly a benefit. “What these do is provide parents a way for their children to focus on art that perhaps they could not have done themselves,” said Ms. Edwards of the Getty.

In another game strategy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has introduced “Murder at the Met,” a game for any smartphone that children can download and then use to search for the person who murdered “Madame X,” the woman in John Singer Sargent’s portrait. They must check out statues, paintings and objects throughout the American wing, following clues to the murderer and the witnesses. Though the museum does not aggressively publicize the game, children can find it on the museum’s Web site.

“Digital is the new iteration of games and certain games are based on narratives, so it is a natural way to get youngsters interested in art,” said Peggy Fogelman, head of education at the Metropolitan. Ms. Fogelman added that the museum arranged an event played by 125 teenagers, in teams. Asked afterward in a questionnaire what they liked about the game, they said that they most liked looking closely at the works of art. That meant the game “did not interfere with the experience,” Ms. Fogelman said. “It enhanced it.”

While there are 278 million Americans with cellphone subscriptions, according to Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst, it is impossible to know how many museum visitors already own smartphones. Museum officials across the country are debating whether they should provide the devices so that all visitors can use them, said Ms. Edwards. “But as we discuss it, the number of smartphone owners continues to increase and many people walk in the door with their own phones. Our approach is to scale up our offerings as the public is scaling up its ownership of smartphones.”

And at the Metropolitan “our experience suggests that people prefer to use their devices,” Ms. Fogelman said.

The American Museum of Natural History supplies a wealth of material for its summer education project, including laptops and smartphones. It provides them to students, some of whom pay to attend the program and some of whom receive scholarships.

“We have taken the digital world and embraced it in a full-throttle way,” said the museum’s president, Ellen Futter. “It extends access to content on site and digitally and deepens our relationship with our audience. It is an opportunity to examine real specimens, talk to our 200 scientists and take that understanding and use it in a digital application.”

The summer Cretaceous Seas seminar lets students play the role of scientists and learn to interpret fossil evidence to bring an extinct sea creature to life. New versions of the program are “What Happened to the Neanderthals?” and “Digital Universe: Flight School.”

“None of those programs could have happened to this extent a few years ago,” said Nathan Bellomy, youth initiatives coordinator at the museum. The Cretaceous Seas project included one activity in which the group went to Big Brook, N.J., to dig up prehistoric sharks’ teeth and rodent fossils.

“The kids were working with real scientists and translating what they found into a virtual prehistoric environment,” Mr. Bellomy said. “The project helped them interpret fossil evidence and then use their computers to recreate the fish in the appropriate environments.

Another young participant, Emily Di Napoli, an 11-year-old student at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, said she had always loved “prehistoric animals and sea life including reptiles that are as long as buses and can swallow anything.” Her long-term goal is to build rocket ships, but Emily said she liked her summer program because “we learned a lot of interesting stuff, and the museum is really cool.”

Just what museum officials want to hear.

A version of this article appears in print on October 28, 2012, on page F16 of the New York edition with the headline: Engaging Children With the Siren Call Of the App. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe